The Diploma I Earned at 64

Paying For It

People always ask what it cost, so I will tell you.

Minnesota lets seniors take classes at the state colleges for almost nothing, but only once you reach sixty-six. I was sixty-two.

The woman in the admissions office was very sorry about it. She said it twice, and then she said it a third time.

So I paid full tuition, the same as everybody else. It came to a little over five thousand dollars a year, with books.

The books were the worst of it. One accounting textbook cost more than my first car payment did in 1981.

I did not qualify for much aid, because of our house and the pension.

I paid it out of the money I had set aside from my last eight years of work, the money that was supposed to be for a new kitchen floor.

The floor is still the old linoleum. I have made my peace with it.

We have one car, a gray pickup that Ray bought used from the implement dealer.

Ray still works three days a week at the farmers co-op, running the scale and helping at the elevator during harvest.

He needs the truck for that, and on the days he does not work, he needs it for the hundred little things a man his age does.

I could have asked him to drive me. He would have done it.

But the college is forty minutes away by truck, and two round trips a day on his work days would have meant him leaving the scale house in the middle of the morning, which the co-op would not have liked, and which he would never have told me about.

So I looked up the county bus. Most people in town do not even know we have one.

It is a little white bus with a wheelchair lift that runs out of the county seat. You call the day before and it comes to a stop by the old creamery.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays it picked me up at 6:40 in the morning and dropped me at the college at 7:22. Coming home it left at 2:15.

The fare was a few dollars each way. The driver, a retired mail carrier named Dennis, learned my name the first week.

The First Day

I will not pretend I was brave the first day.

I was so nervous I packed my lunch twice, because I forgot I had already packed it and found the first one in the refrigerator when I went to make the second.

My first class was Principles of Accounting One, in a room on the second floor. There were twenty-six chairs.

I counted them, because counting is what I do when I am nervous. I took one in the second row, by the window.

The others came in one at a time. Most of them were eighteen or nineteen. A few were in their twenties, one young man in a work jacket from the ethanol plant.

One woman about forty with a baby car seat she set on the floor beside her. And me.

Nobody looked at me funny. That was the first surprise.

They looked at me about as much as they looked at each other, which was almost not at all, because they were all looking at their phones.

The instructor was a woman in her fifties named Mrs. Lindquist, who had been a bank auditor for twenty years before she started teaching.

She wrote the accounting equation on the board, assets equal liabilities plus equity, and she said, “Everything in this course comes back to this line.”

I wrote it down in my notebook and underlined it twice. And I sat there looking at it and I thought, there it is.

That is what the boxes were for. I had been putting numbers into that line for twelve years and nobody had ever shown it to me.

I did not cry in class. I want that on the record. I cried on the bus home, a little, looking out the window at the soybean fields, and Dennis pretended not to see.